Things I hate #1
I’m not normally a blogger. I don’t blog. But my friends are sick of me dumping my thoughts into their instant messaging windows, so I intend to fill this place with my mind dump. That, and Johnathon tells me I should blog, it’s good for the site apparently.
I hate adverts.
Let’s just get this out of the way before I get into the nitty gritties. I object to advertising on principle. Now, people need to know about new things, if a new book or movie or food stuff becomes available I want to hear about it, I usually want to read/watch/eat it. This could take the form of just a simple message like “Generic Brand Cola has released a new cherry flavour” or something that appears in, say, the news paper. Advertising things that have been around since my grandmother was a girl gets on my nerves. Just let me buy the thing when I go shopping, don’t harass me about it every 30 seconds and advertising for services I can’t utilise is something I really can’t stand. I live in a village; my local store is Tesco’s or Sainsbury’s. I don’t care about the great savings that exist in Morrison’s because the nearest Morrison’s is 40 minutes away. I am not going to drive for forty minutes to save 13 pence on ketchup!
So as you can see, I don’t like adverts much to start with. But, much to my horror, it’s getting worse.
I have always felt sorry for Americans. Your adverts, ‘commericals’, seem to last forever, have little relevance to the product and are more infuriating than rabid weasels clawing at your eyes while Joe Pasquale whispers sweet nothings in your ear. Whenever I switched on the TV when I visited the US I’d groan and tut and make a note to punish American advertisers when I am dictator of Earth after my inexorable rise to power. Similarly whenever I caught an advert on YouTube or some video streaming site I’d feel the same.
But now advertisers in the massive transnational corporations (TNCs) have realised something horrifying. Britain speaks the same language as the United States. For more than fifty years they’ve spent money hiring British actors or voice actors to do region specific adverts to appeal to us British but now they are simply airing American adverts complete with irritating voice overs, crude humour and utter irrelevance. These adverts stand out, they stick in my mind, they do their job perfectly. I now can’t stop remembering that I should be eating at Burger King and buying pregnancy tests and driving Hondas. However I don’t do any of those things, out of pure spite. Now sometimes it makes sense. KFC needs Colonel Sanders, without him life wouldn’t be the same. But seriously, TNC marketing execs, when trying to sell me a car hire someone not with a fine Boston accent, but a refined Queen’s English accent or hell; even Joe Pasquale would do better in trying to get me to buy your goods. Pay the money, do some glocalisation and I will buy your goods. It’s not hard, it will make you money, lots of money, and it will soothe millions of people in England who can’t stand your foul ‘commercials’.
Equally annoying is when advertisers try and convince me if I buy their things my life will be like a Californian movie stars. Maybe I don’t want to be an anorexic, insecure, egoistical, rich, bastard who considers foreigners little more than servants who occasionally shoot at you, living in an area where it never rains, snow is a feature of the mythical past which only shows up on TV and occasionally your home is evacuated for fear of forest fires. I quite like being a student and a comic artist trying to get the grades to go to a university where I will get an unimportant degree which will get me a dull job which will keep me alive till I have some kids upon which time I can die with a reasonable sense of satisfaction. I don’t need to know my clothes are worn by people in Hollywood, they’re clothes! They cover the unmentionables and make you look slightly more attractive at the same time. If they do that they could also be worn by Brian Blessed and they’d still be doing their job correctly.
Also annoying is the current fad with supermarkets. Hire washed up TV stars to endorse your store all you like but don’t try and make them pretend they actually buy their food there. No idiot who’d had half his brain removed, lost an eye and all sense of hearing would seriously believe Richard Hammond or Kerry Katona actually buy goods from these emporiums.
And finally, to round off this rant, I am tired of the use of foreign languages in British adverts. I’m looking at you Audi. You go through all the effort of hiring a nice refined careful English voice actor to give an air of importance and credibility and then ruin it by having him recite an unpronounceable German slogan. I don’t know what it means, I could look it up if I really wanted but I shouldn’t really have to. German cars are supposedly good but that doesn’t mean your company slogan should be in German in English adverts. You could just as easily say “By ze way, ve are germahnz ja?” at the end. It would be more effective and I could understand you. Not that I’d ever buy an Audi of course, unless it was to pile them up in a landfill where they belong.
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January 30th, 2009 at 7:15 pm
See, one of the first things I learnt in Media Studies is that adverts are not trying to sell you things. They are there to inform you of a product – and if the advert is good (or bad!), you’ll remember the product. So next time you’re in Ye Olde Supermarkete, you’ll recognise, say, the Marmite jar sitting on the shelf – and then it has your attention, even if only for a little while, so you may decide that you actually want the Marmite.
Another thing successful adverts do well is exactly what you mentioned – make you think that your life isn’t somehow complete without their product. Especially for more expensive stuff like cars or perfume. I have a diagram somewhere listing the various ranges and statuses adverts target – ranging from the basest life essentials such as eating and sleeping, all the way up through romance (a popular one), love, children, all the way up to things like fame and fortune. And damn, it works.
The irony of it is that the fact that you are ranting about these adverts… simply proves that they work. You’ve had ‘em stuck in your brain long enough to rant about them. You remember various things – even if they’re just snippets – that these adverts have given you. And so, they’re all successful.
(However, having a Twitter-like feed of adverts rather than a big long 30-second spiel would be much better. Print adverts are so much better in this respect – you can ignore ‘em.)
January 30th, 2009 at 8:15 pm
Made me remember them, perhaps. But their primary motive is still to get me to purchase their goods and the only thing I have ever bought as a result of advertising is Mars Planets. Perhaps when I am doing the shopping I will buy a brand I recognise rather than one I do not but I always buy the same products, so it hardly matters. My shopping habits have not changed.
I agree to the irony, I do remember them. But adverts should not be this way, this is more what I am trying to say. Products from adverts that I dislike I got out of my way to avoid. It’s a shame, because I liked eating at Burger King, for instance. Products should be clear and informative. Nothing more. In my opinion.